The Amplitude arrived at hedonism honestly, by way of arithmetic. Its members begin from the multiverse — the physics-adjacent argument that all possible worlds exist — and the simulation argument's tidy statistics, and conclude, with what they consider mathematical certainty, that this particular world is almost surely rendered rather than real. From most people that conclusion draws dread. From the Amplitude it drew a shrug, and then a party.
Their reasoning is clean enough to be unsettling. If the world is a simulation, they argue, then suffering endured for the sake of some "real" future payoff is a category error — there is no realer world to bank it in. What remains, the only thing that survives the proof, is the quality of the render itself: the beauty and intensity of experience, here, now, for its own sake. And so the Amplitude has organized its considerable resources — many members are, tellingly, successful — around the pursuit of maximal, meaningful pleasure, and around a single flagship expression of it: the building of ever-larger, ever-more-magnificent art cars for the desert gathering at which the movement holds its high holy days.
It is easy to file the Amplitude under the frivolous, and its members would cheerfully accept the filing. But the desk notes the theology is more coherent than it looks: a group that has stared at the same "this is all fake" abyss that drives other movements to despair or acceleration, and decided that the correct response to an unreal world is to make it as gorgeous as possible before the rendering stops. Their most-quoted line is close to a creed: if it's all going to be rendered anyway, render it beautiful. It is, one has to admit, a nicer answer than most in our files.